Nine years after her first groundbreaking TED talk, Stanford Computer Science Professor Fei-Fei Li had an opportunity to return to the TED stage. With this second talk, she wanted to convey how far artificial intelligence had come in those years and that we were at a new inflection point for the industry.
Through a series of working sessions with Dr. Li, I co-wrote the script for the talk, which Dr. Li gave at TED in Vancouver in May 2024. (Karey Hill Design created the presentation slides). The video of the talk, titled “With Spatial Intelligence, AI Will Understand the Real World,” garnered over 1 million views.
“Let me show you something. To be precise, let me show you nothing.”
Dr. Li began the talk by taking the audience back 540 million years to the moment before the Cambrian explosion, when organisms existed but couldn’t see. When that changed, life could better understand the environment and evolve.
Today, we’re at another inflection point, where Dr. Li and her team at Stanford are pioneering ways to create machines that can see as intelligently as we do, if not better.
“Seeing is for doing. We need AI that can act.”
A key message Dr. Lei wanted to get across was that, in addition to seeing and understanding a picture, computers need to learn how to act on visual information. That’s the power of spatial intelligence, which has the potential to augment human abilities. In sectors like healthcare, this technology can create a step-change increase in the quality of life for patients and productivity for providers.
